WELCOME to the debut of “The Truth Is!”, a blog of reporting and commentary that aims to be informative, thoughtful and provocative. At least initially, the blog will have a strong heartland flavor by virtue of the connection of a number of us to Cowles family journalism. I am former editor of the Des Moines Register’s opinion pages. Another contributor, Michael Gartner, is former editor of the paper; he later served as president of NBC News. Another former Register editor who has agreed to contribute, Geneva Overholser, is director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of journalism. Followers of the blog will have access also to the work of Herbert Strentz of Des Moines, a close Register and other newspaper watcher who once headed Drake University’s journalism school. Bill Leonard, a longtime Register editorial writer, will add insights.

“The Truth Is!” will be supervised by my daughter, Marcia Wolff, a communications lawyer for 20 years with Arnold and Porter (Washington, D.C.). Invaluable technical assistance in assembling and maintaining the blog is provided by my grandsons Julian Cranberg, a college first-year, and Daniel Wolff, a high school senior.

If you detect a whiff of nepotism in this operation, so be it. All of it is strictly a labor of love. —Gil Cranberg

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Say what you will — and we all have — the lead-up to the 2016 election so far is….is….is?

Well, maybe Shakespeare characterized much of the give-and-take among presidential candidates in “Much Ado About Nothing.” Or maybe he caught the spirit of today’s political rhetoric in Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

When it comes to the “sound and fury” of presidential debates, consider a quote attributed to both Mark Twain and Winston Churchill: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

And some 270 years ago, Thomas Gray explained why Republican and Democratic candidates ignore obvious and well-founded truths and instead play to the misguided, and even false, beliefs of their base. Gray wrote, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." (So GOP candidates question the worth of vaccines, ignore climate change and defy anyone to mention evolution.)

Linking any one of the Shakespearean or other insights to a specific episode in today’s campaign entertainment is frustrating, however; the flow of charges and counter-charges, slogans and sound bites is halfway around the world before you can sort things out.

Better to focus on something relatively stable in the 2016 campaign — Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” and the other candidates who say our nation is a basket case sorely in need of their quack remedies.

The line “Make America Great Again” scores at least a hat trick by being much ado about nothing, full of sound and fury and appealing to a blissful base. It’s the sort of political and mindless manipulation that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language.”

“Make America Great Again.” What does that mean? At Fourth of July commemorations three months ago and for at least a century Americans have heard speakers say America IS the greatest nation on earth. That declaration Fourth after Fourth goes unchallenged — at least until it suits today’s candidates to resort to Halloween and horror stories instead of flag waving.

In a few ways we’re better than ever. The Affordable Care Act has extended medical insurance coverage to several million of our fellow citizens. Court decisions have extended human rights to people other than white men. Few of us desire a supposed return to be “great again” if that “again” means subservience to white males with everyone else in the back of the bus.

Besides, an agenda for greatness must look forward, not backward.

Look forward to actions and not just talk about serving the millions of armed forces veterans so long neglected in actions, but well-supported by bumper stickers. Look forward to dealing with our prison incarceration rate, the worst in the world. Look forward to enhancing, not debasing, women’s reproductive rights and health care. Look forward to making college education costs manageable and encouraging, not prohibitive. Look forward not to cutting or raising taxes, but to giving citizens a better return on the taxes they already pay. Those and other steps to greatness are all but ignored in the “Much Ado About Nothing” and “sound and fury” approach.

Further, what does it mean to be a great nation? Is that a goal simply to talk about, after which we can lean back and relax? Or maybe strut about, having achieved greatness? Or is national greatness always more of a starting point, a challenge to continually extend freedom and the fruits of greatness to others in our nation and beyond, rather than building walls?

Sadly, we remain far short of the nation that James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and others envisioned in their grand experiment. Rather than yearn for a return to a delusional past, however, we should accept the challenges and opportunities in the years ahead. That’s what elections are supposed to be about — despite Trump and the debates.

Offered below is an Iowa newspaper's editorial endorsement of Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia for U.S. President. It likely was the first-in-the-nation endorsement for a candidate then known as “Jimmy Who?”

But the endorsement resonates today because of Mr. Carter’s recent diagnosis of cancer and because the qualities ascribed to him in the endorsement differ so markedly from what candidates claim today.

The endorsement was from John McCormally, editor of the Burlington Hawk Eye from 1968 to 1979; before coming to Iowa he was editor of the Hutchinson, Kansas, News, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for news and editorial coverage of the need for legislative reapportionment. John died of cancer in 1993 at the age of 71. A grandson, John McCormally, is an Iowa assistant attorney general.

The Burlington Hawk Eye

Jimmy Carter For President ...

December 20, 1974

By John McCormally

I reserve the right to change my mind several times between now and November 1976, but as of now, I'm for Jimmy Carter for president. And if I had to decide today, I'd round out the ticket by teaming the outgoing governor of Georgia up with the in-coming governor of Connecticut, Ella Grasso, for vice president.

That gives you a ticket nicely balanced, north and south, male and female, with executive experience, the right touches of liberalism without being suicidally radical. Best of all, neither of them has ever given the impression they thought they were God Almighty.

That's why neither of them has impressed you much. They haven't yet been remanufactured by the media and put on sale as the saviors of mankind and leaders of the free world. How faithful I remain to them will depend a lot on how successfully they resist the determination of the icon makers to turn them into plastic persons.

Liberals will consider Carter's first liability his southern address. I shared that bigotry once myself, distrusting anyone from the South. But if recent events have taught us anything, it is that, block for block, there are more rednecks in Boston than there are in Atlanta.

The other thing that disenchants the kingmakers is that Carter just doesn't look like king making material; it is safe to say that most people still have never heard of him. He doesn't give any assurance of "generations of peace" or that his administration will produce the greatest events since creation.

Which is all in his favor. If there's anything we don't need, it's another superman. We need to start out with the premise - which we abandoned with Coolidge - that all we need for president is someone capable of managing one of the three branches of government for four years, with the generally accepted minimum of honesty and ability that is expected of all of us on our jobs. If we luck out and do better than that, it's a welcome bonus. In fact, the less we expect of the president, the more attention we will pay to the performance of the congress and judiciary and the state governments and the business conglomerates that own the country, all of which affect our daily lives far more than any president.

Still, we want a president who sets an acceptable tone. If he is too obviously a charlatan, like Johnson, too obviously a crook, like Nixon, or too obviously a dodo, like Ford, he detracts from the overall performance.…

Carter's an appealing fellow. There's an air of decency, a disarming simplicity, about him that's long been lacking in Washington. He has a varied background: Annapolis graduate, practicing scientist, peanut farmer, and politician.

He still needs to be measured against whoever else, in either party, comes on, but for now, I think he's the man to beat.

And for the benefit of the female chauvinist piglets, I wouldn't care if the ticket were reversed.

Gilbert Cranberg is George H. Gallup Professor of Journalism Emeritus, the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He was associated for 33 years with The Des Moines Register and Tribune where he was editor of the editorial pages of both papers.

Cranberg taught for 18 years at the University of Iowa's journalism school. He co- authored "Libel Law and the Press: Myth and Reality," (The Free Press) whose authors won the 1987 Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists for research in journalism. Another book, "Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper Company," (Iowa State Press), was published June 2001. He is the co-author of several law review articles on the subject of libel.

He served in the infantry in the Pacific during World War II. He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University (1949) and received a master's degree in social science from Drake University (1956). He was for six years an at-large member of the National Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a Fellow of the World Policy Institute and of the Open Society Institute.

Cranberg served as chairman of the Professional Standards Committee of the National Conference of Editorial Writers and as a director of that organization. He was a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and of its Ethics and Values Committee. He is a life member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers for having "achieved exceptional distinction in the profession." He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, Journalism Quarterly, Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, Nieman Reports, American Bar Association Journal and Iowa Law Review.

Michael Gartner

Michael Gartner was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and J.D. from the New York University School of Law. He joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal in 1960 as a copy editor, later becoming Page One Editor. He served in various positions with the Des Moines Register over 11 years including Executive Editor, Editor, President, Chief Operating Officer and Editorial Chairman. He went on to serve as General News Executive for Gannett Co. and USA TODAY and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

In 1988, Mr. Gartner became President of NBC News and served in this capacity until 1993 when he became Chairman and Editor of The Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa. Mr. Gartner was for six years a member of the Iowa Board of Regents, and he is chairman and principal owner of the Iowa Cubs baseball team.

In 1997, Mr. Gartner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for his editorials about community issues in The Daily Tribune.

Geneva Overholser

Geneva Overholser is director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Before her current position, she held the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting for the Missouri School of Journalism, in its Washington, D.C., bureau.

Overholser previously was editor of The Des Moines Register, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, an editorial board member of The New York Times, ombudsman of The Washington Post and a reporter for the Colorado Springs Sun. Under her leadership, the Register won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of Professional Journalists and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard. She served on the board of the Pulitzer Prize for nine years, the last year as chair.

Overholser was named “Editor of the Year” by the National Press Foundation and “Best in the Business” by the American Journalism Review. She co-edited the book, The Press as an Institution of Democracy and authored “On Behalf of Journalism: A Manifesto for Change.” Overholser wrote a blog for the Poynter Institute Website and a regular column for the Columbia Journalism Review. She spent five years overseas, working and writing in Kinshasa and Paris.

Herb Strentz

Herb Strentz is professor emeritus of journalism at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He was a founder of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and served as its executive secretary from 1975 to 2000. In 2004 he was named to the "Heroes of the 50 States, The Open Government Hall of Fame" of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the Society of Professional Journalists.

His PhD is from Northwestern University and he taught at Bakersfield College, the University Kentucky, and the University of North Dakota before going to Drake where he served as dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication from 1975 to 1988.

Strentz also worked as a reporter for The Fresno Bee and the Associated Press in Albany, NY, and worked part time and during the summers for The Minneapolis Tribune and the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company. He is the author of "News Reporters and News Sources," which was published by the United States information Agency in Spanish, Chinese and Arabic.